Monthly Archives: August 2015

Curacao, Macro

Have you gotten lost in the underwater small small world of Curacao?

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Fire worm detail
Fire worm on star coral

Typically, when I get to a dive site that I have not been to before, my initial thought is to use my wide angle lens so I can try to take pictures of the large reef structures and any fish aggregations so that I will have a general sense of what a particular dive site is like. Most of the time I dive with groups, so if I am shooting wide angle the challenge is to only have one or perhaps two divers in the image. I usually do alright at keeping up with the group, although by buddy says I am pretty slow and tend to be at the back of the group.

Nevertheless, there are times when I pull out the macro lens to take underwater pictures. A trip we took to Curacao not to long ago was one trip were I was glad I had packed the macro lens. We dove with Ocean Encounters, which is an excellent shop. Good safety briefings, skilled and well trained staff and solid equipment. One of the dive leaders we dove with on several dives was Pol Bosh. Pol is extraordinary at finding the small critters that live on the reef system in Curacao. Curacao has quite a few sea hares which are shell-less mollusks. One such sea hare he found was a Petalifera Romosa.

From the gastropod family
A sea hare my friend Pol pointed out in Curacao
This Petalifera Romosa was perhaps at most an inch in length, yet with a macro lens it looks fairly large. This sea hare dwarfed some of the other sea hares that Pol found and were at most only about a quarter of an inch or a centimeter in length. (I wish my eyes were that sharp and could readily spot creatures that small).

Pol was also quite skilled at finding arrow crabs.

Arrow crab and sea anemone
Arrow crab and sea anemone

Curacao does have a multitude of macro subjects. So typically I was way at the back of the group with my buddy trying to hurry me along.

Frozen in time
Four-eyed butterfly fish and gobey

I hope we get to go back to Curacao to get lost in the small small world of creatures that live off of its shores.

A hungry blue tang
Blue tang grazing on algae

Mexico, wide angle

Is diving at the underwater museum near Isla Mujeres worth the effort? — Yes!

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The Librarian
The Librarian

In the abstract, a 30 foot dive with artificial concrete reef structure does not sound like a very interesting dive, at least to me. Yet, when you have artists who are willing to spend countless hours forming the concrete into hundreds of different statues that resemble people engaged in a variety of activities, all of a sudden the dive does become interesting. The underwater museum in Isla Mujeres has 500 sculptures with three different galleries submerged between three and six meters of water. The museum began in 2009 and was completed at the end of 2013. The series of sculptures by Jason deCaires Taylor and five other Mexican sculptors are located in the Cancún National Marine Park. The museum was thought up by Marine Park Director Jaime Gonzalez Canto with the help off sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor.

Variety of Statues
guadeloupe underwater

When we dove the museum, one of the divers on the boat was a doctor from north Texas. He was making his second trip to the museum and said he wanted to see how many statues had been added. We also met a new diver from the San Fransisco area diving the museum. She was newly certified and seemed to enjoy the dive all the while taking pictures of the experience.

Of all the statues that we saw the one that spoke to me was one I refer to as the barrister.

The Barrister
The Barrister

To me it looked like an English Barrister pleading his case underwater. He is surrounded by statues who may or may not be particularly interested in what he has to say. Oh, that is the life of a trial lawyer, something I have been doing for over 30 years.

Roatan, wide angle

Do you look up when diving?

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Goliath Grouper silhouette
Goliath Grouper silhouette

Not long ago I read an article that talked about how divers often became mesmorized by looking where the fish are, mostly near the bottom and often under ledges and over hangs. The problem the author said was that sometimes the most interesting things were swimming over the heads of the divers who missed them because they did not look up.

With that thought in mind I recently dove the Odyssey in Roatan Honduras. As briefed the dive was to have a maximum depth of 100 feet. We would not stay there very long and then we would gradually make our way up a wall near the wreck. As we got down to the wreck I shot some video of the wreck which is quite large. Here is my dive buddy Tony checking out part of the wreck. https://www.flickr.com/photos/bcampbell65/20074724821/

Midway through the dive I turend off the video and switched to stills. I looked up and overhead there was an enormous grouper that was swimming. He was easily 5 feet in length. I thouht about leaving the strobes on, but thought a silhouette of the fish might be interesting. During the rest of the dive we saw some black groupers as well and they were also in the 4 to 5 foot in length range.

Glad I looked up to see such incredible animals. Here is some of the video from the wreck dive:

Barbardos, wide angle

Barbados and anticipating marine life

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Looking in looking out; its all a matter of perspective

It was during the second week of a two week trip that we flew into Barbados, with the expectation of finding time for a few dives. We had done a few dives in Guadeloupe the preceeding week, and the diving had been less than stellar, in part because of the lack of visibility. In part because of odd things that occurred during the trip. So it was with some hope that we landed in Barbados and then drove to the Crane to stay for the week.

Barbados, unlike many of the Caribbean islands, is a coral island and is very flat. Many of the islands in the Caribbean owe their existence to volcanos which rose up from the sea floor to create the island. Oh, and Barbados was my fist experience of driving on the left (wrong) side of the road. Before we got to the dive shop my brain was already on overload. Bajian drivers are freindly, but they don’t drive slow. If you are already having to rethink right and left, it can be a bit of a challenge to do it, and go fast. (For me it was kind of like pat your head and rub your tummy). Thankfully we did make it through the week without any driving mishaps.

We dove with Ecco dive, an excellent dive shop that keeps its dive groups to a small number of divers. Andrew, the owner is exceptionally knowledgeable of the marine environment and gladly shares his wealth of knowledge with his guests. He is also a very talented underwater photographer. One of the ideas that Andrew passed on to me was that marine life do follow certain patterns of conduct; and if you see certain things happening, you can make educated guesses about what the marine life will do next. Now that is a very powerful observation for an underwater photographer because if we have an understanding of how certain activity is likely to unfold, we can position ourselves to try to capture it. Since I dive open circuit, which is very noisey, positioning myself to capture interesting marine activity is quite a challenge. That is, the fish can hear you coming and often times will scatter if you fin in to try to get close to them. On the other hand, if you are patient and wait for the fish, and can anticipate what they might do.

barbados3-1

One other thing I learned in Barbados that I had never thought about before was that the water in some parts of the Caribbean is saltier than in other places. Barbados is one of the places where the water is saltier that other places, so plan on adding another 2 pounds of weight.

barbados-1
Below is a link to an article I wrote about the last dive we did in Barbados.

http://oneworldmanylifes.blogspot.com/2012/09/extending-air.html